Restructuring at Flipkart, three top-level executives resign

Bengaluru: A day after top level restructuring at India's largest online retailer Flipkart, three top level executives are leaving the Bengaluru-based company as new CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy starts building his team of top executives primarily consisting of company veterans.

Saikiran Krishnamurthy, who headed the e-tailer supply chain unit Ekart; senior vice president Surojit Chatterjee, who headed product and chief marketing officer Samardeep Subandh are leaving the company, according to a company executive briefed on the matter.

All three executives had joined Flipkart in 2015 when Flipkart was aggressively hiring top talent from outside after raising over $2.6 billion in funding between 2014 and 2015. The hires were driven by then Flipkart's commerce platform head and Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal, who left the company February last year. The reason for the departure of three executives could not be immediately ascertained. When contacted, a Flipkart spokesman declined to comment.

The exit of these executives comes after Flipkart announced on Monday that Kalyan Krishnamurthy will be the CEO of the main horizontal commerce unit and also oversee Ekart.

Binny Bansal was elevated to Group CEO and will oversee other businesses, in cluding payments (PhonePe) and fas hion (Myntra, Ja bong), in addition to finding new growth drivers for the group.

As a part of this reorganisation Nitin Seth, current chief administrative officer at Flipkart, was made the COO for Flipkart with additional responsibility for Ekart and customer experience besides HR, strategy and corporate functions. Seth was directly reporting to Kalyan Krishnamurthy under the new structure.

Saikiran Krishnamurthy, a strategy ex pert from McKinsey, was initially roped in as COO of Flipkart's commerce unit and later went onto lead Ekart.

Subandh had worked at FMCG companies like Hindustan Unilever and Marico.

Chatterjee had joined Flipkart with ne arly a decade of experience of at Google, and is the last high profile from Silicon Valley to leave the company.

Other two executives -chief product officer Punit Soni and chief technology officer Peeyush Ranjan -left the company last year.